Battle at the Box Office 8/19/24

Alien: Romulus managed to unseat Deadpool & Wolverine from the top spot at the box office this past weekend and one of the best openings in the Alien franchise.

Alien: Romulus opened to $41.5 million, the second-best opening in the Alien franchise (unadjusted for inflation).  It’s up by around $5 million from where the last entry, Alien: Covenant, opened in 2017.  The movie has $108 million worldwide, powered by a bigger-than-expected opening in China.  The movie got a B+ CinemaScore, which isn’t great, but we’ll have to see how word of mouth got out this upcoming weekend and how much it drops off.

Deadpool & Wolverine dropped to second with another $29 million, dropping 46% from last weekend.  The movie has $545.8 million domestically and $1.142 billion worldwide.  It is currently the 6th biggest movie in the MCU domestically and the 9th biggest MCU movie worldwide.

It Ends With Us dropped 52% from last week’s opening, dropping to third place with another $24 million.  It now has $97.7 million domestically and $179.9 million worldwide.

Twisters and Coraline rounded out the top 5.  The latter was re-released in 3D as part of a special Fathom Event celebrating the movie’s 15th anniversary this year, making $9.6 million.

Further down the list, Borderlands utterly collapsed, as expected, dropping 72% from last weekend and only making another $2.4 million.  It now has $13.6 million domestically and $21.3 million worldwide.  The movie is being dumped onto Digital as a Premium Rental at the end of next week, but Lionsgate will lose a massive chunk of change from this video game disaster.

Alien: Romulus also had the best per theater average of the weekend, making $10,682 in each of the 3,885 theaters it was playing in.